10 May 2007

The OCC concept is interesting: every week, at the same time, in the same place, a meeting takes place. The focus of OCC is on Internet entrepreneurship, but one could re-use the same structure for any other topic ... something I've missed with other offline social networks - I need to find out where it is this month, which day, what time. If I miss it I wait another month before the next opportunity. OCC is every week - I don't need to obssessively attend each and every meeting.

On top of that, it's completely informal. There's no speaker, no agenda. Just tables, chairs, people and drink. OCC seems to belong nicely with Open Space and similar unconference approaches to building communities.

03 May 2007

at XP Day France today we debated whether software is or should be an industrial process or an artesanal one. It's always interesting to explore new analogies for software development. Car manufacturing was mentioned frequently.

Just for fun, I came up with some more. Sofware is like:

Evolution of Species

Stock Trading

Politics

I'm not sure where any of these fit in the industrial-artesanal dichotomy. What they all have in common is competition. The software industry is a whole bunch of memes competing for space in your brain. Competing methodologies, platforms, frameworks, approaches, languages ...

We - developers, users, IT departments, corporate clients - feed software memes with our brains. We take a bet on who will win - object/functional, java/c#/ruby, eclipse/intellij, windows/linux/mac. And our gamble affects the outcome. Kind of like voting. Or trading. Or evolving.